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Hi, everyone (I like writing that, as if I’m addressing multitudes of readers). I’m back. Back from four days of meditation in honor of the prodigious accomplishment of a man who lived 25 centuries ago. His name was Buddha, and his achievement was waking up to the truth of life.

I was worried how this particular meditation would go, given that my body is hurting and my mind worries about that when it has nothing else to do. The first three days of sitting were great. On the fourth day, my downstairs neighbors, who happen to be my landlords, began partying in the recently renovated Man Cave (directly underneath my bedroom).

There I sat in front of my altar, gazing into the heart of a candle flame, as concentrated as I ever am, the very picture of a conscientious zen priest, when the turning words all aspirants long for finally arrived, at top volume: “A____, get your ass in here!” Apparently A____ deigned to do no such thing, because the injunction was reissued several times, with increasing wholeheartedness.

I decided to move my meditation somewhere quieter, which turned out to be the bathroom. It wasn’t bad. Warm and relatively peaceful, with plants for company and the new candle: Christmas lights tracing the roofline. After the partying settled, I settled in front of my altar again, finally wrapping up my dogged pursuit of enlightenment at 11pm.

Along about 11:30, after I’d dragged my vociferously aching body into a chilly bed, my landlady decided to organize her Christmas presents. I could hear her footsteps, back and forth, forth and back, under my bed and over my white-noise machine. I was suddenly and intensely angry. I didn’t want to go downstairs because I knew I’d get drawn into a conversation, and I was supposed to be nurturing silence. So I fumed, silently.

The next morning, I probably didn’t look too good, or too friendly, when my landlord greeted me. I said I hadn’t slept well. He said he hoped it wasn’t because of them. I said, well now that you mention it, someone was busy around 11:30, and that kept me up for awhile. Then my body finished the job. He was somewhat sympathetic, though he stopped short of apologetic.

I’m sure he said something to Mrs. Claus though, because the downstairs doors slammed harder than usual that afternoon. Or was it my imagination? And the aforementioned A____ resumed his practice of jumping down the last step in the hallway, setting off aftershocks every time he crossed the house. Which was often.

When the time came to go to bed, I went, but didn’t sleep. I was too furious. And stressed about what to say or do. I rehearsed notice-giving speeches in my mind until they sparkled with eloquent regret. I revisited fuming. I ranted, silently, about how much I hate passive-aggressive people, without spelling out whether I was thinking of myself or my landlady.

When things really hit bottom, I opened my computer and surfed apartment listings on Craigslist. I didn’t email any of them because I didn’t want prospective landlords to ask themselves what kind of person looks for apartments at 2am? But I took notes. And fumed some more. I also took every herb in my soporific arsenal, to no avail. I even threw my principles to the wind and dug out the Nyquil. That knocked me out for an hour, and I was awake again. And furious, again.

In the morning, which felt like a paler shade of a neverending night, I realized I had no energy to muster for the conversation with my landlords. At the same time, I needed to do something. So I wrote a note. Only two drafts, a miracle for me. The letter was a masterpiece of evenhandedness and multiple position-taking, if I may say so. It was true and balanced, a fair feat when the author is hopping mad and seriously sleep-deprived. But no blaming, no whining, no threatening. Even some genuine affection — although it may not be obvious from this account, I actually do like and appreciate these people.

When the hour became reasonable, or at least less unreasonable, I knocked on the downstairs door and tendered the note, along with a clean Tupperware container in which my landlady had packed her awesome tomato soup. Odd combo, I know. My landlord looked so alarmed when he took the note that I hastened to reassure him, “Don’t worry, it’s not that bad.” Meaning I hadn’t given notice (except those million times in my mind, which he didn’t need to know about).

Then I swept the snow off my car and drove to the big city to have my breasts clamped in a vise, which seemed appropriate. After which I treated myself to lunch, buying time to write in my journal and calm myself, while conveniently postponing having to go home. Which I refused to call home in my journal, referring to it instead as back.

I have to say it’s been quiet as a grave today. I’m a bit worried. I imagine the whole family huddled in their bathroom, muttering, “We have GOT to get rid of that
b____!”

If life were a bell curve, this season of mine would be drawn as a downslope. My father, an English teacher, once said, “No one ever writes about how it feels to be nauseated.” And it’s true that although that sensation has figured prominently in my last few months, I haven’t wanted to write about it, or the other forms of physical and mental discomfort I’ve been experiencing. My goal for this blog is to inspire and empower readers, and I doubt reading about nausea would help.

A friend asked me whether my intention means I can write only about happy things. Which does seem unreasonable, as well as annoying. She surmised that I might learn things worth knowing from my battle with Lyme, but those famous silver linings might not come to light until after the experience has passed, and I can reflect back on it. I’m skeptical of that kind of transcendence though – it’s too easy to wax enlightened after an event, once you know you’re safely past it. Any clever person with a penchant for seeing the bright side can pull off that trick.

But I stubbornly feel that transcendence ought to be possible in the very thick of suffering, in the messy heart of it. I believe that light exists alongside and in the midst of darkness, not merely following it, as day follows night. My friend wasn’t sure – isn’t transcendence by definition moving beyond a situation? Can we move beyond something while we’re still in its midst?

And can we do this in a way that doesn’t deny the reality of the experience, its right to exist and be acknowledged? I’ve always wondered what the word redemption means, not as an idea or a consolation, but as something to live. Viktor Frankl wrote of what he called the final human freedom, the ability to “choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances — to choose one’s own way.”

I once dreamt I was being given a tour of the underworld. It wasn’t a particularly hellish place, just very dark and quiet. Which meant that every glimmer of light caught the eye: a faint glow burnishing the train tracks, the bioluminescence of small creatures living in the Lethe, radiant mushrooms adorning tree trunks like scattered jewels. Confiding my impression of Hades to my guide, I said wonderingly, “I never knew there was so much light in the dark.”

In his memoir Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes of a man whose plane goes down in the desert:

The hardest job I had was to force myself not to think. The pain was too much, and I was up against it too hard. I had to forget that, or I shouldn’t have had the heart to go on walking…. What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.

These words, among my favorites since I read them, resonate especially these days. They remind me of walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco the last time I was seriously sick, about fifteen years ago. The labyrinth defied my foremost defense mechanism: looking ahead. Squinting into the future and trying the plot the best route to the destination doesn’t work — the path is too circuitous, and dizziness sets in long before any progress can be made. Which is not unlike the experience of researching medical mysteries online.

Trying to estimate how far you have to go doesn’t work either. You might be standing right next to the center, but you can’t jump the track, you can only follow it. And just when you think you’ve arrived, the path inexorably bears you back to the perimeter, directly away from where you want to go. A line in the zen poem Sandokai says: “Progress is not a matter of near or far.” What kind of progress doesn’t mean moving closer to a goal?

In the labyrinth, all that makes sense is to keep your eyes on where your feet are now, step by step. Trust or faith in the path definitely makes the journey easier, but such companions can’t always be summoned, and have a way of ducking out just when things seem darkest.

Yet the fundamental truth of the path is this: just because you can’t see the future doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

While many emotions act as spurs to creative expression, sadness isn’t one of them for me, and that’s been the prevailing weather lately. Which accounts for the fact that it’s been awhile since my last post. As I was explaining to friends last night, my intention for this blog is that it offer something to readers — inspiration or uplift, at least an interesting thought to chew on. If I don’t have that, I see no point in taking up people’s time with more words, of which there are many in the world already.

All I have right now is a series of intellectual impressions; I don’t know if they add up to anything. But I’m putting them down in hopes that something will resonate for you.

At a retreat this weekend, Buddhist teacher Mu Soeng offered the following summary of our human existence: we’re always seeking support and security from people and things that cannot give it, thereby putting ourselves in the way of continual disappointment, suffering, and harm. This is an absolute statement, which means it isn’t always true. Some things and people can be relied on more than others. Yet nothing can be ultimately and always relied on. Under the right (or wrong) conditions, anything will let you down.

He asked us to consider whether it’s possible to create a life of not wanting anything from any person or situation, as a way of reducing suffering, or as he called it, “managing harm”. I think it might not be possible to avoid wanting things, and some things are worth wanting, but we can negotiate how tightly we cling to our wants: how we justify them, whether we let them harden into expectations, and how we respond when we don’t get what we want.

The topic of the workshop was “psychological homelessness”. This is an important theme in Buddhism, where the ordination ceremony is called “leaving home”. I wonder if there can be a kind of home within homelessness, a being at home within oneself and the world no matter what happens, inside or out.

Part of the reason this idea resonates strongly for me now is that I feel physically and mentally besieged by the bacteria I’m hosting at the moment. It’s not clear how long they mean to stay, whether I can evict them, and what the costs of their staying and going might be. How can I make myself at home here?

David Loy writes that “we project a higher ‘spiritual’ world to compensate for our inability to be comfortable in this one.” This statement may apply to many religions, but not to zen. In zen the only world is this one. It might seem higher or lower depending where you stand and what you look at, but for better or worse, there’s only one world in the here and now. Which is obviously slim consolation when the here and now isn’t pretty.

While I was procrastinating writing this column, I read a response by TV journalist Mike Rowe to criticisms of his recent spot about a doctor who’s trying to save endangered whooping cranes.

Experts call it “congruency,” that rare and wondrous state that occurs when your beliefs and your actions line up perfectly, and net out in a vocation or avocation that you truly love. Dr. French is first and foremost, congruent, and thus, perfectly suited for [the show].

I understand congruency as continuous practice in all the moments of one’s life and death, and as another word for home — a graceful yet adamantine integrity that might be the only ground we have to stand on.

I’m going to pick up a thread from my last post and my friend Jaylene’s comment on it: How do we know if our practice is “working”? Which is oddly enough the same question I have about the antibiotic I’ve been taking for the last two weeks.

In the case of spiritual practice, the question feels a bit problematic, especially within a zen lineage that emphasizes practice for its own sake, with “no gaining idea” — no goal. Eihei Dogen, founder of Soto Zen, famously wrote that practice is enlightenment; there’s no distinction between the two.

Much as there’s no border between samsara and nirvana — they’re both right here, right now. Which one we experience in a given moment largely depends on our attitude toward our lives and the degree to which we’re able to accept reality.

“No gaining idea” is based on the zen ideal of purity in action, meaning our actions aren’t corrupted by motives or agendas beyond themselves. Kodo Sawaki Roshi observed that we believe we go to high school to get into a good college, then to college to land a good job so we can have a good life, etc. He finds this way of living, with everything serving as a stairway to something else, ridiculous. Possibly because the future is so unpredictable, contingent on myriad causes and conditions. And because neverending dissatisfaction (dukkha) is built into this way of life. And yet this is how we usually proceed.

So what do we mean by a spiritual practice “working”? In my case, nearly a decade staring at a wall trying not to think — has it worked? Hard to know, partly because I entertain no expectations of it. Strange to say, since I harbor abundant expectations, often concealed until they’re disappointed, in relation to most facets of life. Amidst a generally goal-oriented existence, I’ve felt it important to do one thing for no reason: no good reason, no bad ones. No expectations or justifications. Even I think meditation is a bizarre thing to do, especially with the intensity I do — five days a month is a lot of nothing.

Certainly I’ve changed over the past ten years, but how can I attribute the shifts to practice? Life is an experiment without a control. I think when we talk about practice working, we mean making us bigger and better — wiser, more compassionate and peaceful, more free. Maybe this last is the key. The fact is, having no expectations is a kind of freedom; there’s no way to win or lose, succeed or fail. And to do something year after year without expectation is an exercise not only of freedom but of unconditional love, something many of us could use practice in.

About a week ago, after a long meditation, I started feeling as if I had the flu, a gentle, weird kind of flu, reminiscent of the giardia I experienced my first winter at the zen center. I went to the library for DVDs and found myself face-to-face with a poster about Lyme disease. And then I remembered the tiny tick bite a few weeks back.

The last ten days have been full of research. And cascading emotions: frustration at the bureaucracy involved in finding a doctor and the politicized disagreement on Lyme diagnosis and treatment, anxiety about making the “right” decisions amid many unknowns, and simple fear.

A friend joked about “working my zen magic” and I admitted that zen seemed to have flown out the window this week. Which reminded me of a teacher’s comment: “I want a practice that will see me through blindness, cancer, death, through anything.” That always made sense to me — that spiritual practice (which is essentially an expression of love) has to be unconditional to be meaningful.

For me practice means how we live our lives day to day, a way of being in the world that we can embody no matter what’s happening. That’s the theory. How to make it real in every moment, including the scared, sick, uncertain ones?

“I was waiting on a moment
but the moment never came.
All the billion other moments
were just wasting all away.
I must have been dreaming.”— The Flaming Lips

I love this song and its title, “Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell.” Ego tripping by arrogantly rejecting the actual moment for an idea (usually flawed) of a moment that would be better, if only it were real. Better for whom? What’s the calculus for the moment we have in mind? Anytime we deny or dismiss what’s occurring, we escort ourselves to the gates of hell. We can’t love everything that happens, but we have to respect its reality. Embracing the real is the condition for living in this world rather than an idea of it, the prerequisite for both cherishing and transforming it.

First, a disclaimer: I’m thinking now that half a margarita before dinner and writing might have been a mistake. Although a delicious one, as some mistakes are. So I’m drinking the other half with a mug of green tea, hoping they’ll balance each other out.

I’ve been wanting for a while to write about creativity. A recent cartoon in The New Yorker was titled “Creation: The True Story”.

“On the first day, God created nothing, because there was plenty of time. Second day: same deal. ‘Why rush?’ On the third day, He created a list. On the fourth day, He was not in the right mood. On the fifth day, all this stuff was going on. You don’t want to know. On the sixth day, God created the whole shebang. On the seventh day, He rested.”

For me this captures the creative process precisely: riding the tides of mood, energy, confidence, inspiration, and distraction while desperately holding on and hoping something worthy happens eventually.

Creation, like everything else, depends on relationship — with yourself, with your audience, with whatever you’re making. Historically this relationship has been personified through the muse.

Growing up, I found the muse trope annoying, mainly because of its gender stereotyping: muses were women, the artists they inspired, men — everyone knew that. I resented the assignment of stereotypically feminine characteristics to the muse: capriciousness, for example. For a long time, I had no truck with the muse racket; people had to shoulder responsibility for their own inspiration, that was that.

Somewhere along the way, my thinking changed, as it does, possibly not often enough. These days I envision the muse as someone to talk to: someone who listens, asks thought-provoking questions, makes inspiring contributions, and never interrupts — the ideal conversation partner.

A muse might be someone you know, or want to be known by. Someone you’re trying to inspire, convince, entice. In this case, your agenda will determine your expression. Or the muse might be anonymous — an otherness of undefined qualities, nothing to cater to or defy.

I go back and forth between these conceptions (capricious, I know). What matters most is that I imagine someone listening. Because if not, there’s no point to talking. Although I do sometimes talk to myself and let people eavesdrop.

I started this blog in January with the admirable goal of posting daily, the mere contemplation of which makes me tired. I didn’t tell anyone about it or take measures to help people find it. I did let it slip once in a call with my sister who, ever alert, inquired why she hadn’t heard this before. “Well, it’s a secret,” I answered lamely, demonstrating my mastery of the explanation that explains nothing.

“A secret? On the internet?” she cross-examined, demonstrating the impeccable logic that has lanced many a fine delusion. Then she offered the suggestion which is probably responsible for the survival of this blog to date. “You might find it easier to keep writing if you told people, so they could read it and talk back.”

The truth is, everyone who writes or has ever written has been talking to someone, a someone either particular or hypothetical, phenomenal or absolute. I’m ambivalent about the proliferation of technology, which has exponentially increased the frequency of communication to the detriment of its quality — depth, beauty, and thoughtfulness. With words, more isn’t better.

Yet it’s an incredible boon for anyone with a computer to be able to express herself freely and feel, rightly or wrongly, that someone out there is listening. So here’s the deal: I’ll keep writing once a week or so. You keep reading when you can. And maybe drop me a line once in a while?

I was going to write about muses today, but I’m in a different kind of mood after driving by an assembly of stuffed animals getting rained on a few streets away. The animals are gathered next to the sidewalk because a man killed his family and himself in the apartment building there a couple of weeks ago.

I’d been resisting reading about it, the way I often resist the news, because most of the time it doesn’t help. But after I drove by, I knew I’d have to read the story, if only as an act of witnessing. The police said the man had financial problems and was depressed, and his wife was being treated for drug abuse. The neighbors said they were a nice family. One man offered, “If you want to kill yourself, that’s one thing, but Christ, give your kids a chance to have a life, to have something.”

I think one of the hardest things to accept is that actions, no matter how crazy they seem on the outside, usually make sense within the framework of the actor’s perceptions. This is profoundly disturbing, that there’s an inner world in which killing three young children could “make sense”. It feels better to say we don’t understand, to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and such a world.

I’m thinking of a scene in Sam Mendes’ movie Away We Go, about a couple searching for a suitable home for their coming child. Lying in bed one night, the woman turns to her partner and asks, “Are we fuck-ups? Maybe we’re fuck-ups.”

Who hasn’t felt that sometimes? If you feel it long enough, and if you have three young children, it might come to seem an act of mercy to spare them the world you know, the one you’ve made with your life. I’m not saying this thinking is right, but I don’t find it difficult to understand. Of course, I don’t know what was in the father’s mind; no one does. And the time for help has come and gone.

So what can we do with this? From another film, one of my favorites, The Year of Living Dangerously: “I support the view that you just don’t think about the major issues. You do whatever you can about the misery that’s in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light.” Not that pondering the “major issues” is bad; I just find it incapacitating, much as I find reading the news incapacitating.

What helps is to do something, to do anything we can for the lives in front of us, and to keep doing things, even if we sometimes wonder if we might be fuck-ups, or the people around us might be. To continue asking, what’s the best thing to do right now?

Right now I need something easy. Lay towels under the leaking roof, do the dishes. It’s been raining all day here; I keep thinking those stuffed animals, wet as they are, must be the brightest things around.

Just back from four days of meditation, so if the following is less coherent than usual, blame it on enlightenment 🙂 Which is described in a beautiful poem by Charles Wright as “Some dead end — no one to tell it to, / nothing to say it with.” I’ll take his word on that!

I’ve been wanting for awhile to write about being a minister and some of the demons that get wrestled with…nothing as exciting as The Exorcist (so far), which might be a good thing.

Bear in mind that it’s only been three years since my ordination, so I’m still figuring this out. But one of the things I’ve noticed is the startling projections that arise. I consider these a kind of demon. As long as the projections stay external, where they belong, they’re limited in the harm they can cause. But I refuse to start believing them; that’s when weird ideas become dangerous.

After a lesson, one of my English students was confiding her romantic traumas. I said something like, “I just hate when that happens!” She looked shocked and said, “Being a priest, I thought you would have transcended all that.” I responded, “You mean, transcended being human? I don’t think that’s in the cards.”

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to have transcended. Having emotions? Loving people? Sometimes being disappointed by them? Which part of living and being human was I expected to transcend, exactly? One answer I run into is that longtime spiritual practice should mean you don’t get upset or angry.

This is wrong. Contrary to a common misunderstanding, zen’s “goal” is not to make emotionless robots of people. Nina Hartley, daughter of two zen priests and former porn star, noted in an interview: “Buddhism says that to experience any of your feelings, you have to experience all of them.” This has remained one of my favorite statements of Buddhist practice since I read it several years ago.

Experiencing all one’s emotions is vital, as is experiencing all of life; this is the very definition of vitality. Psychologist Alice Miller wrote, “The opposite of depression isn’t gaiety; it’s vitality,” which she defined as the ability to experience the full range of human emotions. Feelings, even very painful ones, are not the problem; what we do with them can be.

One thing we often do with our painful emotions is pour gasoline on them in the form of our thoughts: replaying and magnifying and justifying the one-sided stories around our pain, thereby prolonging and intensifying the feeling, and preventing possible resolution of it. Another quote, from A General Theory of Love: “Humans are the only animal that responds to trauma by re-traumatizing itself.”

The natural thing for an emotion to do is run its course, like everything else in life: to transform. We tend to obstruct this process out of a misplaced assumption that life is safer if things stay the same, that even a deeply painful known is safer than an unknown. But the only things that stay the same (for awhile) are things that were never alive; they’re plastic. They aren’t even dead, because dead things also transform, which is one of the most eloquent proofs that death is actually part and parcel of life, rather than its opposite.

It seems obvious, but I need to say it: a minister isn’t holier-than-thou. I can’t do this job well if I fabricate artificial separation between myself and other human beings, or if I support them in doing so. I don’t like the word holy anyway; I think it’s meaningless. As Bodhidharma said, nothing’s sacred. Meaning nothing is more sacred than anything else. The minister narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead explains that the sabbath isn’t more sacred than other days; it’s simply the day we set aside to remind us of the sacredness of every day.

A minister isn’t more sacred than anyone else; they’re someone whose job it is to exercise as best they can a reverence for life in all its manifestations. Someone who has vowed to try to live by certain ideals, to manifest them in daily life as fully as possible in each moment. Not that you’re always doing good, but that you’re almost always trying. That means when angry or hurt, still trying.

Recently I overheard a neighbor yell at her boyfriend, “You’re supposed to fucking talk about it so we can make this better!” While this was a reminder that there are some very good things about being between romantic engagements (e.g., happily watering my plants instead of having a fight), I agree wholeheartedly with her sentiment: anger and hurt can be a path to making things better, depending what we do with them.

Helping people transmute the pain of living is one of the things ministers do. Although such help is more limited than one might wish, because the work of figuring out what matters most deeply to someone and then living accordingly has to be done by the person most intimate with a particular life. Hence the Buddha’s final words: “Be a lamp unto yourself.”

Which means there’s no excuse for abdicating responsibility to any religious institution, creed, or individual. I express myself with passion because that’s how I experience life. I hope people listen to me with openness and curiosity, measure what I say against their experiences, use what’s helpful, and let the rest go. My interest is never in telling people how to live, but in encouraging them to ask and answer that question for themselves, if it feels vital to them.

Recently my horoscope cited the above as a fitting metaphor for the challenges ahead in my life: “encouraging and overseeing growth in a place that doesn’t seem hospitable in the usual ways…. And you must be patient, knowing that the process might take awhile longer than it would in other circumstances.”

Although I love discovering that such a feat is not only possible but happens already (in a geothermally heated greenhouse), the patience part is ominous, that virtue not being one of my strengths. The closest I usually get to approximating patience is covering up my impatience, which is no approximation at all. I always assumed I’d be more patient when I got older, but so far the magic doesn’t seem to be kicking in. If anything, I might be even less patient now than when I was a child, which can’t be good.

I’m intensely aware of time and often surprised how long it takes things to happen. I wonder if this could be a side effect of reading so much when young — an unreasonable expectation of eventfulness. In books, things happen in an artificially compressed timeframe; there aren’t many pages devoted to people brushing their teeth or running errands, usually, and if by some mistake there are, we can always skip them. But there remain large and unskippable swaths of life consigned to these and other relatively unexciting ventures.

This fact underlies David Foster Wallace’s excellent advice for young people:

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

There’s probably no easier way to make yourself miserable than constantly wishing things would happen differently…for example, faster. Everything travels at its own speed: light, sound, imagination, life. I think part of my problem is an active imagination that’s as real to me as any reality out there, and sometimes more so. Imagination generally moves a good deal faster than life.

Image Ian Vollmer

How much scenery is wasted on someone impatient for a particular view, which may never materialize? We do need our visions, and we need to believe in them sufficiently to keep trying. Part of that belief, that faith or trust, is patience. Things happen the way they can, given the myriad causes and conditions of the moment. In a letter today, a friend writes: “If the future is just more present….” This I think is true — in the deepest sense, the future is simply more of the present. It takes two years to ripen bananas in Iceland.
I wonder what they taste like?

“Home, how to know what it is when you’ve never had one?
Home, I don’t know where it is but I know I’m going.”

These lines from U2 have always resonated with me. Not that I’ve never had a home, but I’ve never really felt I chose it. There were always imperatives: educational, professional, romantic. As a result, the actual places felt somewhat random and incidental. Until last year, when I finally had a totally free choice. Since you never know how long these windows intend to stay open, I leapt through and chose a northern place without too many people, three miles from the ocean and three blocks from a river.

My one-year anniversary here is approaching, putting me in a reflective mood. Part of me is still amazed I actually made a choice and staked so much on it. I never do well in Chinese restaurants with twenty-page menus because I feel you have to look at all the possibilities to make an informed decision. Then you have to know what the options actually represent, like how chicken feet really taste, but the only way to find out is to try them, and who wants to do that? Not me. But still I feel bad on some level for having a closed mind about chicken feet, because then how many other things am I ruling out without even trying, which seems arrogant, and besides maybe chicken feet are mind-blowingly delicious and I’m missing a fantastic experience in this one and only life I believe in.*

I remember walking into a Seven-Eleven with my ex when he was still smoking despite my best efforts (this was in the days I believed it was possible to change people). He asked for a lighter and the clerk asked what color and he said, “I don’t care,” and I was taken aback. I would have to see all the colors, or at least hear them, and then pick from the available choices. I remember thinking, “This is a totally different kind of person,” which did in fact turn out to be true beyond the matter of cigarette lighters, even if they weren’t necessarily a valid reason to think so.

So you get a sense of why it’s surprising I actually made a choice out of a whole country full of places I’ve never lived in or even flown over. But it’s one thing to make a choice, and another to keep making it, day after day, “choosing again what we chose before,” as poet Wendell Berry wrote about marriage. Before I moved here, I was talking with a good friend about the mystique Maine held for me, which I mistrusted because it seemed a flimsy foundation for a long-term decision and I didn’t want to have to move again. What if it wasn’t everything I hoped? There was no way it could be, because actually I didn’t know anything about it; Maine was just an idea — a seductive one, but still only an idea. My friend said, “Well, you could ask whether a place will have enough to make you happy, or you could ask whether you’re determined to be happy there.”

This statement rang in my mind like a zen koan: how much is happiness a matter of what you find “out there,” and how much is it simply a decision? A commitment, in other words. A serious determination to be happy, regardless what happens. To me commitment has never signified a refuge from time and change; I don’t believe there’s such a place to be found or made in this world. Commitment isn’t measured by how long something lasts, but by the quality of heart with which it’s undertaken — by giving yourself completely with nothing held back, day after day, for as long as you honestly can.

So is a home found, chosen, or made? A few years ago, for an art exhibit on this theme, I wrote: Home is warmth, nature, company, solitude, sunlight on the floor, rain on the roof, a bathtub, a dog, peace, an idea of order, and a small cup of strong coffee. By these measures, Maine and I are doing well (with the exception of the bathtub and a traumatic 24-hour canine adoption that I’ll discuss another time, maybe, but which I don’t hold against the state — that one’s on me). The thing that impresses me most is that within my first year here I’ve made a handful of friends I feel totally comfortable with, at home with, if you will. That’s never happened so fast, and I’m taking it as a sign, because why not? Jung said as long as our beliefs don’t contradict proven realities, we should pick the ones that are most helpful. It helps to believe I might be home at last.

*I finally did try chicken feet with my Chinese sister-in-law a few weeks ago, and I have to say they’re not nearly as bad as they seem in your mind, like a lot of things.

This week marks a return — to Maine after a few weeks visiting friends and family, and to this blog after more than a few weeks of radio silence. June got away from me.

I feel somewhat scattered, as usual when I’m acclimating…I keep leaving objects in odd places and forgetting things as soon as I’ve thought them. The heat doesn’t doesn’t help with this, or with tempers in the ‘hood — a young woman has been swearing vehemently for the past fifteen minutes in the parking lot next door.

When you come back from away, at first it’s like entering someone else’s life — you see your home as a guest might: the pictures, the bed, the order or lack of it. For the first hours and days, you feel you could choose whether to resume this life or walk away. There’s an interval before your accustomed life reclaims you, a space both free and uncomfortable, in which you’re not sure whether you belong to your life, or it to you.

It’s curious what harbingers usher in belonging. This time it was the string of pineapple lights my landlord hung on the deck as a surprise, and the Cool Whip container his wife placed under one of my plants to help it drink. Her attentiveness reminds me I read somewhere that the word diligence derives from a root meaning love. I liked this idea so much that I exhort my students with it while refusing to google whether it’s actually true.

Going away and coming home is what meditation is. And in travels of any kind, you want to take the landings gently.

Today I’d planned to write a post about my 25th college reunion, which would be easier if I’d followed yesterday’s plan to attend it. Fortunately, lack of an experience is no obstacle to writing about it; in fact, it might be a help.

Although we usually like to live anywhere but here and now, the past is rarely my chosen habitat — left to its own devices, my mind abides in the future, the realm of dreams and possibility. I only wax nostalgic when I’m sick. Then I replay my life like a movie, to entertain myself and/or prepare for death. I find this reminiscing richly pleasurable, but as soon as I feel better, I’m back to the future again: planning, preparing, worrying, fantasizing.

I could defend my preference for the future by arguing that the past is a disappeared country; you can’t go back because that place doesn’t exist anymore — it ceased the moment it passed. And I think this is true. I’ve kept a journal going on 40 years. About a month ago, I reread parts of it for the first time. It struck me how my memories bear almost no resemblance to the way I experienced events at the time.

I suspect our memories are undergoing constant revision. Depending on our habits of mind, we remember things more or less rosily than they happened. We revise our interpretations of our history in light of who we are now, and the ever-unfolding consequences of events.

So it’s clear that the past isn’t a fixed place; it’s always shifting. But the future is hardly more real — it’s purely hypothetical. If we’re not living in the present, our choice is between things that didn’t happen the way we think, and things that haven’t happened at all. Slim pickings.

T.S. Eliot wrote, “We are only redeemed from time by time.” This is a way of saying that eternity lies in every moment, which the founder of Soto Zen, Eihei Dogen, would agree with wholeheartedly. Meaning all moments are embraced by this one: all past and all future. This feels true, since this moment is plainly the culmination of every preceding moment, and the source of every moment to come.

But what does this mean for our lives, for how we live? Maybe it means trying to live in the world, rather than an idea of it. Instead of driving down to Boston yesterday, I went to Home Depot in the next town, bought several herbs to start the deck garden I’ve dreamed of for years, made basil and garlic pesto, and walked on the beach near my house. A prosaic day.

Gazing at the tiny islands resting in the bay, feeling the powerful southerly wind sweep my mind of everything inconsequential — ideas of past and future — I thought, I’m in a place I love, trying to figure out how to do work that matters, surrounded by people I care about — who would choose to be anywhere else?

This week I headed south to visit friends. It was a good weekend immersed in art, springtime, leisurely southern accents, and Starbucks. One of our conversation threads was hypothetical lives — who and where would we be if certain formative circumstances had been different: family dysfunctions, geographic and chronological influences, distracting personal dramas?

I confessed to a longtime habit of comparing my actual self and life with an idea of both, which I was supposed to manifest. I often worried about getting off track. Now I wonder what track I was thinking of, and where it came from. To own any of the events of your life, I think, you have to own them all. Because if one thing were different, then everything would be, and yours wouldn’t be the life you know. A human life has this fundamental integrity; it’s interwoven.

Integrity derives from a root meaning “whole”. In talking about zen, I often say that ours is a whole world in a way that transcends what we think of it. It’s a whole world because it encompasses everything, and because each thing is connected with everything else, whether or not those ties are visible to the naked eye. In the physical realm, this is a matter of fact: the continual recirculation of elements, the interdependence of earth and sky. In the non-material realm, it may be more a matter of faith.

I’ve mostly broken my habit of comparing my real life to a hypothetical one (usually to the detriment of the former — when we theorize, why do we so often choose hypotheses that hurt?). At a painful and pivotal juncture, a teacher at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center said to me, “There isn’t some other life out there that you should be living. The only life is the one you’re in.”

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